Sometimes so-called filler is killer

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2024 (466 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Remember when television seasons were, well, a season?

Actually, they took us through three seasons. They took us from fall to spring before leaving us hanging on a cliff for the summer. As it should be.

I’m currently watching three older shows: the 1990s NBC sitcoms Frasier and Mad About You, which I have seen before, and ABC’s 2000s survivalist drama Lost, which I haven’t, despite it being a massive phenomenon at the time.

I thought I was late to the Lost game but I actually find myself a little au courant: Lost was recently added to Netflix in the U.S., ushering in a whole bunch of online discourse about it — including a listicle in New York magazine’s Vulture vertical about which episodes you can skip when bingeing or rewatching.

Must we optimize everything, including watching television? Must everything be done as quickly as possible? Are we really skipping entire episodes of TV for efficiency now?

Lost is a gift and it is a gift precisely because the first season has 25 episodes. Mad About You has 22 and Frasier has 24.

Most current TV seasons — of streaming shows, especially — are essentially 10-part films now, following a precedent set by HBO, AMC and others.

The 10- to 13- episode season — or even as few as six episodes if you watch shows from the U.K. — became the hallmark of Prestige Television. These shows have high production values. They take time to write. They often have big-name casts and big-time budgets. It’s a simple “quality over quantity” proposition.

As such, there’s much more pressure to produce seasons of television that are all killer, no filler.

But you know what? So-called “filler” has its place.

Give me a zany B story. Give me stunt casting. Give me a season of TV that can really stretch out. Give me risks. Give me episodes where it’s clear the writers were “trying something.” Give me world building and character development.

Gilmore Girls was particularly gifted at this. The rapid-fire dialogue and colourful cast of townspeople often disguised the fact that Gilmore Girls is actually a slow-burning dramedy in which not a lot happens that allows two mother-daughter relationships and dynamics to unfold over 153 episodes.

ER, my favourite show of all time, boasts 331 episodes over 15 seasons. And while this medical drama had its share of blockbuster, teased-out-by-weeklong-ad-promo episodes — see: a main cast member getting his arm cut off by a helicopter’s spinning blades before the opening credits roll — there are episodes one might consider “filler,” specifically the episodes that took the docs out of the hospital.

With more than 300 episodes, not all of them will be winners. That’s just math.

But more runway also allows for big swings that pay off, too, such as the Season 4 première, which was live and had to be performed twice: once for the East Coast and again for the West. If ER had a 10-episode order, it might not “waste” one on such a thing.

Occasionally, silly “filler” episodes can end up being among the most memorable, like the episode of Frasier in which the title character and his brother Niles buy a whole-ass restaurant during the commercial break and proceed to have a truly disastrous opening night.

It might seem like a left-field choice to have these two accomplished psychiatrists — one of whom is also a locally famous radio personality — to purchase an ageing Seattle culinary institution they will never mention again, but at a character level, it absolutely makes sense: arrogance often gets these two into trouble. And the resulting episode is a 22-minute masterclass in slapstick comedy and sight gags, especially when the over-brandied cherries jubilee goes up in flames.

Maybe that’s why so many contemporary prestige streaming shows have held fast to the Christmas Episode, despite their releases not adhering to the calendar, and the Bottle Episode, which focuses solely on one (usually not main) character: absent a longer season, they are two of the few sites left for experimentation, for taking the story on a tangent, for making the kinds of “filler” episodes that often aren’t filler at all, but rather a world — and characters — fleshed out.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

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